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slowd1ving · 1 month ago

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✦ IV. WEEP FOR HIM, I BID OF THEE

'Ratio had not been man for a millennium. He had not heard, not seen, not felt, not tasted, nor smelled, for a thousand years. It began with a faint frequency that droned in the very recesses of the stone. A buzz, or a low hum, resonated as though he could hear the very orbitals of electrons whirring in each atom. At this point, the background levels of his simulations had ceased—for this was far more important. For the first time in centuries, the sluggish pulse that still beat in his undead chest had quickened, just a little.' • . * cursed prince ratio + alchemist m reader rough design for minoan fashion ratio here warnings: video game violence, death? kind of? tyranny (are we surprised), male-coded reader (or at least the in-game avatar is) wc: 15.7k

LAMENT OF OUROBOROS MASTERLIST

HONKAI STAR RAIL MASTERLIST

MASTERLIST ・゜・NAVIGATION

On the first day came death, on the second a state of limbo, and on the third came rebirth—in the form of an idyllic meadow and the iron tang of blood far in the distance. Living was a constant skirmish; a fight amidst an amorphous crowd of not just humans, but against the nigh omnipotent tides of nature and its catastrophic ebb and flow. Every breath you took, every minute shiver of your body was all weighed against you: shivering in the frigid chill as you prayed to whatever higher existence there was that you’d live to struggle some more.

Your limbo would not come just yet.

Facing you was a man who teetered on the edge between cowardice and courage. Fear dulled his chromatic eyes, that seemed to only resign themselves to you leaving him far behind while you slipped out of his hold. It would’ve been easy. Wounds littered his arms into vices far too weak to anchor you in place, and the latent hum of the equation you’d failed to complete was still circulating throughout your body like a second respiratory system—endowing you with freakish strength.

Behind you, past the worn bark of the tree that concaved into your flesh, was the behemoth occupying the river that had produced the clay that you’d filled your pail with: now knocked futilely to the ground, mauve seeping into the earth once more. You couldn’t see it, but you could hear the massive volume of water displaced with each shift of its swaying, powerful coils of steel-like muscle. A monstrous frequency tainted the otherwise clean air—piercing right past the inked dermis of your body and painfully twisting against your very veins.

Any longer, and you feared both you and the stranger afore you wouldn’t live much longer.

You considered him, trembling like a fragile leaf while trying desperately not to show it. Despite his acceptance of whatever fate allotted him, he clearly desired to live, whether he knew it or not.

Then, you studied the river. Not visually, but rather you tasted the faint salt on the air—wetting your lips slightly, feeling its sharp brine on the roof of your mouth and then the back of your tongue. The sea was just out to the west, and the river meandered into that: freshwater and seawater mingled in this area, enough to give your clay a slightly unfamiliar consistency. From what you saw, the river was wide; perfect for the foolhardy plan slowly taking root in your mind.

In turn, the stranger studied you too; there was no matching panic in your own pupils, but a more analytical, dispassionate observation that put you into the shoes of a spectator rather than participator in this scenario. Like you didn’t belong there—and you knew it, too.

Casually, you weighed the stick in your hand. It was up to your chest—a solid, decent height—yet in the face of that grinning colossus it was no more than a twig: a toothpick for its gaping maw to use after chowing down on the two of you. But it would do.

◼◼◼◼◼ father thereof ◼◼◼◼ Sun, the mothe◼◼ Moon; wind carried ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼◼ with great sagacity it doth ascend◼ gently from Earth to heaven ◼◼◼◼ again it doth descend to Earth.

The soft song of the tongue of thought wove against your neurons, clearer than ever. But the stranger wedging you betwixt him and the tree was unaware of the crooning placations building a spell in your mind—he could only watch you straighten, more alert than ever.

But not to run. No, your stance looked like you were bracing yourself—not with painfully squeezed-shut eyes and a grimace for your impending doom, but rather with the disposition of a doctor armed with a syringe. There was a clinically straight set of your mouth as you gauged the usability of the primitive weapon you held.

No time to think.

The leviathan was growing impatient; and you could practically hear its webbed crown fan out as it prepared to unleash whatever toxins it had built. But something else, too, was building: a buzzing of ions that were slowly disrupting the vein-twisting frequency emitted by the monster. In a split second decision, you diverted some of the energy tracing its electronic, droning charge back into your body to fortify it.

It was risky. Your plan was risky, and you knew it. Maybe the stranger knew it too, but you had no time to care about his knowledge of weather phenomena.

Thus was this ◼◼◼ world created.

Where the tattoos glowed, your skin began to splinter in incandescent lines; and the sudden flow of charge seeping through fragile dermis of your skin caused your tentative ally to jolt back: stumbling against the tree root and falling to the soft foliage. But still you didn’t use the opportunity to run. Rather, you turned so your back now faced him—light bleeding through the clay- and blood-muddied cream shirt. It was reassuring, which he found to be ludicrous: in this situation especially, where his trust in others had been whittled to nothing.

Fuck, this hurts, you momentarily took a break from the chant—feeling your mouth taste like static charge, like the metallic blood you’d gurgled prior to your death, But this time you weren’t dying—not when you still had to fulfil the self-assigned duty of rest in this life.

Like an arcing javelin, the hands imbued with electrical power jolted the stick into the rest position of projectile motion—primed with an almost-superhuman awareness you never possessed before and probably wouldn’t possess again. Limbo had occurred; a sacrifice of your energy that had now returned back into a far more destructive form.

Above both the clearing and the river churned dark clouds that weren’t here just minutes prior. With them came the pungent scent of ozone, a homage paid to the events that were about to unfold shortly. Your mouth filled with the bitter, ionic remnants and the filthy taint of blood.

“Sa keres?” he hissed out behind you. ‘What are you doing?’ It was a garbled question, tied together only by the fact that it was his mother tongue. Each syllable from the tongue of honey was scattered with panic, inclining into a pitch that almost transcended the range of human hearing. As if to punctuate his poignant hysteria, you could hear him scrambling back as flickers of electricity began their coils down your body—beginning to char the once-soft shirt with pinpricks of a soot black.

You couldn’t reply, too focused on the continued chant in your mind, as well as the hurried assessment you were making of the pattern behind that massive, weaving head. Though it was faint, the remnants of coding were there behind the eternal loop of the monster—shaking its frilled crown, ducking slightly, turning against the banks, and finally coming to a brief pause as the sequence came to a close.

True it is, without falsehood ◼◼◼◼ certain and most true.

You toed a line with your dominant foot behind you, settling into a loose stance that would allow the perfect parabola through the air. Video game mechanics didn’t show the effects of air resistance, thus you surmised you could probably get away with bending the laws of physics a little.

Theoretical, the calculation was—written somewhere on your body, no doubt.

Ha’qal yaqina la◼◼ shaka◼◼ fih.

Its monolithic, blinking eye was lined in your crosshairs: a horrifying sight, burning aureate sliced in half by a slit pupil.

The acrid smell of ozone grew stronger.

With your other hand, you guided the end of the stick to where the pupil would end up after the sequence concluded.

The sinew in your body was beginning to slowly turn into live wires, hyper contracting your muscles as you fought to stay conscious in the torrential current that was threatening to teem from your skin itself. Not yet… Past the thrumming veins and the aorta that throbbed with pain, was the dermis that was pulsating along the etched lines of the formulae—white-hot crackles of electricity were invading the confines of each equation, and your mind was starting to cloud over deliriously.

Not yet…

The monumental crown fanned itself out.

Your hold on the weapon tightened, fingers pressing into the wood grain even as your skin fought to stay together.

Ten seconds. Ten seconds it would take, once the ruffles closed, to act. Missing wasn’t an option: never was, never would be, not if you wanted to get out of this alive. The creature blinked as its head wove this way and that, breath just grazing past the bark of the tree you stood behind—the surrounding foliage withered immediately, and you swallowed thickly.

The power thereof◼ ◼ is perfect.

Your hand no longer shook, but rather thrummed with the coursing circuits lighting up beneath your skin.

“◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼,” you murmured, just as the head began rising back to its neutral position. Equivalent exchange.

As above, so below.

Your muscles screamed hoarsely, protesting the quicksilver motion of your arm as it flung the stick with all the borrowed force you’d exchanged. It was so fast it hurt: flesh and sinew practically creaking in how it snapped forward. But there was no time to nurse your wounds and proverbially lick them—there was only space for watching the stick pierce into the pupil.

It was a needle in the face of a camel. For a brief moment, the massive basilisk stood stock-still, and that was when you forged past the aching hum of your body to transition into the second phase of your incantations.

If it be cast upon the Earth◼◼◼◼ it will separate the element of earth from that of fire, the subtle from the gross.

The behemoth shuddered, and rapidly descended into thrashing—attempting futilely to dislodge the firmly-stuck stick from its eye. It convulsed madly, and you prayed it wouldn’t whip its colossal neck towards you while you finished the final few lines.

By now, the water from the river was flooding from the banks as the colossus disturbed the waves in its distress—the bilious smell of its lethal breath soon filled the surroundings, but there was only ozone you tasted. Too much water. Panicked, you realised there was water sloshing around your ankles; by extension, it had soaked the man behind you.

You turned, wobbling slightly in the recitations, gesturing for him to get away with hand signs universal even as you crossed into a different one. The hurriedness of your movements left no time to observe his reaction to your ability: the way the breath caught in his throat; the strange, sharp pounding in his chest; and the tremors his hands carried—far more so than when he’d escaped from that hellhole and accidentally came across the basilisk in its territory.

It was only when you heard the scrambling sounds get more distant that you finally relaxed. Not a minute too soon. You pressed your blood-slicked palms together, feeling more of the red liquid drip from your nose and splash onto your wrist.

Uniteth ◼◼◼◼◼ in itself the Sky and the Earth.

The sky tore itself asunder. It, ‘it’ being the cloud-stained firmament, split in two jagged halves as light descended from the heavens. Or, more accurately, lightning pierced through the delicate hues and straight through the eye your stick had marked.

It was a quick death, if not a painful one. The basilisk contorted and thrashed, until suddenly it didn’t—topping over onto the bank only a dozen or so lengths away from the pair of you. Dead. You might’ve felt a twinge of pity, if it hadn’t been out for blood.

Rolling waves crackled with dying electricity as you scampered back, but your calves still felt the faint crackles of voltage pressing in from the sloshing water that was now ankle-deep around you. Though, in actuality, it may have just been the remnants of the energy you’d exchanged—gone unused in the depths of your muscle and bone.

It didn’t matter, not when the light had faded from the ink on your body and blood bubbled from your dry mouth. Dimly, you registered your metal pail floating on its side just near the blond; and your eyes could only flick feebly upwards to meet his own, widened ones. Your heart pulsed, sticky and metallic on your tongue: and it clouded the words forming on your tongue weakly.

“To… umiro.” The syllables coalesced into a clumsy string in honey tongue; a futile attempt to be reassuring, when your clothes were stained with blood and charred marks and your fists still palpitated with small pulses of electrons. ‘It’s dead’. You staggered, pressing your fingers into the tree you hid behind only minutes prior to this—digging your nails harshly into the bark while you fought to stay upright.

The profile was right—transferring energy into another form was far more efficient than turning it into a material object. But that didn’t do any good when you could feel the unfamiliar energy; you were due to collapse any time soon from the fatigue that had built up—ignoring the energy sacrificed.

Still, you thought drowsily as you fumbled the thin, cold handle of your pail (the clay, miraculously, had stayed half in the bucket), the combat experiment had been extraordinarily useful to gauge how far you could push yourself in a fight. Casually, you wrung out your shirt and the rolled-up bottoms of your trousers, before you glanced at the massive snake one last time. Just like a minute ago, it was still dead.

Whatever. It no longer concerned you; as someone who dropped Lament of Ouroboros an hour into playing, you had no concept of the value of the beast, nor how rare it was. Objectively, it was a fat snake. Perhaps you could take its massive skin for yourself, or find a market for basilisk meat, or even carve its massive teeth into more suitable weapons than the damn stick you’d found to walk with.

Like a cracked pomegranate, the lightning had pierced through its body and spilled its innards onto the banks, while a fang lay chipped nearby.

“Wait!” Ah. In all honesty, you’d forgotten about the blond man who now scrambled to his feet with a stricken, almost-panicked look in his eyes. While he was in the throes of adrenaline, his pinprick pupils had allowed you to observe briefly the vibrant turquoise and magenta rings in his eyes—blue spreading into the purple in a shade you’d never quite seen so bright. Though now, they had dilated back to a healthy size; similarly, his irises were almost completely purple as he held your wrist in a slight daze. You frowned.

“Yes?” A headache began to form.

. 　⁺ ✦

In the end, you took the stranger home.

“Sorry,” he’d murmured with his teeth worrying at his lips, a habit you used to have back on Earth. Maybe that was what had made a shred of pity dampen your wizened old heart, or maybe it was the countless wounds that needed treating as soon as possible. You didn’t know what he was doing all the way in the deep of the Borderlands (you also didn’t particularly care), but it was particularly commendable to stay alive so long when he looked like he sucked at fighting. Perhaps he just had some insane luck, some you could’ve used a life ago.

Though, you thought while flexing your fingers, this life had certainly made up for its shortcomings, present just a few months ago.

His name was Aventurine, he’d told you, eyes searching your face as if you were meant to react. Great, you’d replied, but you hadn’t given him your own in return as you half-carried, half-propped him up: his arm flung over and secured firmly in place by your hand over your shoulders, while your other hand gingerly clasped his side with a metal pail bumping against him. You win some, you lose some, you’d sagely surmised. Judging by the ornate clothing, which still wasn’t given as a convenient window of your system (seriously, you had to do some serious guesswork with that massive snake!), it was evident that he could be someone important—though you lacked both the knowledge and the shits to give to treat him with whatever courtesy he ought to have been owed.

No, his name was actually Kakavasha, he’d amended hastily as he sat down in your bathroom. Maybe it was simply the brief security he felt when, upon seeing the long stairs in your house (and his face becoming a tad more palloured at the sight), you’d gently picked up his too-light body and merely climbed the rest of the way to the large bathroom that gazed out onto the forest and distant horizon. You said nothing. Neither did he, but when you held down his shoulders to wrangle him onto the wooden stool that clattered against cerulean tiles as you dragged it over to the cabinet where you kept medical supplies, he decided to finally break his silence. Alchemy, to your annoyance, could not directly be used to heal—at least not yet, when the finer points of anatomy eluded you.

Cool, you replied once more, in that same impassive tone. For someone you were going to send away in a few business hours, he sure was chatty. Peeling off the long, dark coat that had been stuck to his body by blood, and the subsequent quality shirt (that was damn near unrecognisable with how much it had been torn and bloodied), you missed the faint pink on his face whilst you surveyed him clinically.

A long gash from left pectoral to right clavicle. Bruising around the rib area. Lacerations on his lower abdomen. Bruising on his lower back, as well as many smaller wounds on his upper. Grazing on his arms with a more serious abrasion on his left bicep.

“...No broken bones, right?” It was the first sound from you that hadn’t been monosyllabic. Really, almost dying together made you practically amicable. Buddies, even. These paltry words were the most you’d spoken to anyone in weeks.

“No.” He was quiet as you pressed a ball of gauze soaked in cold spirits against the shallow wounds with nary a hiss. “...Thank you for saving my life.”

“Don’t sweat it. It was going to eat me too,” you returned. Gratitude that wasn’t mere platitudes came rarely. Gratitude was what you should’ve gotten by shouldering your runaway mother’s debts, but that never happened.

His sincere, earnest gaze prickled your skin with discomfort; too used to perfunctory nods and smiles.

“It was the most terrifying sight I’ve seen.” And for a brief moment, you didn’t know who he referred to—that basilisk, or the you so carefully wrapping his arms up with bandages. Your scent was that of blood and saltwater, tearing into his senses with an acuity that only reminded him of how easily you felled that beast.

He didn’t elaborate.

You didn’t ask further.

. 　⁺ ✦

“Are you a spellsword?”

The question was both unprompted and unprecedented. Aventurine peered his gem-like eyes up at you, while you paused in your deft chopping of fragrant onions. You could only stare back. Really, you hadn’t expected him to stay longer than three days at most, but apparently your interpretation of him being a flighty individual was ill-conceived.

This was his second week staying with you, and between his slowly accumulating jabber was the transfer of drachma and minae on a startling level. If you thought Dan Heng had been rich, this guy was on a completely different level—gifting you so much gold that you avoided any semblance of the shade in your clothes for the past few days.

Wearily, you thumbed the jade bead that felt slightly heavier despite the enchantment on it that prevented it from ever growing so. Or maybe it was your body, bone-tired from your self-dubbed ‘apprentice’; you still didn’t know why you dumbly accepted, though the wild look in his sclera that gave him the appearance of chased prey might’ve contributed partly. Although, you didn’t particularly understand what knowledge you were meant to pass on.

“They’re mages who are proficient in physical weaponry,” he clarified when you kept mum—a habit of yours that hadn’t changed even after your death. A prickle of hot oil stung your hands as you swept the root vegetable into a gleaming copper pot. “I thought you might be one. If you could take out a beast that had killed over a dozen of the knight company I’d been travelling with, then you must be a spellsword of the highest calibre.”

A beat passed, in which you considered the weight of a false identity to further mask your own as an alchemist.

“Foremost, I am a sculptor,” you murmured, feeling the drag of the kitchen chair as he padded over to you—an act graceful despite his slouching, which further reinforced your theory of him being an important figure in a far off land. It only puzzled you, to be frank.

Why?

The answer eluded you as you supped with him, as you swilled the wine you’d managed to ferment, as you sunk below the fragrant bubbles in the large porcelain tub upstairs. You didn’t probe into his origins, thus the question of your class was the limit he could ask you, too. In fact, he didn’t even mention learning the ability you’d showcased at the river—rather, he was content in merely basking in the warmth with you and working over the clay you’d salvaged. In fact, sculpting was the only profession he seemingly wanted to learn from you as your apprentice: not the strange magic you possessed, nor the knowledge of chemistry packed tightly into your brain.

“What are you thinking about?”

It became a routine, of sorts. Like some… colourful… lucky… bird, he brought back shiny things he’d ‘chanced’ upon in the forest. A pail of the smoothest clay you’d ever seen. A slab of the most luminescent rock you’d ever had the pleasure of carving. An opalescent bauble, delicately strung upon a thin chain—something you severely doubted that he simply stumbled upon.

You eyed the man who stood by your stool while you worked the clay absentmindedly with your hands. The breeze today was especially pleasant, enough that your mood was light enough to actually reply with far less hesitation than normal.

“Your abnormal luck,” you answered bluntly, gesturing to the large barrel of the soft medium that stood proud in the corner.

“Really?” His voice was low as he leaned down, melodious even as he enunciated the harsher cadence of the common tongue. He was close, too close, enough that you could smell the faint aroma of floral tea on his breath and the expensive scent that lingered at the base of his throat, bound by the transient form of perfumed oil. Your oud, in particular—the one he was adamant on using despite the wide collection you’d purchased with a mere fraction of the drachmae that you now possessed.

You couldn’t move back. If you did, it would be losing a gambit that you didn’t know existed in the first place. Some form of psychological attack, in such an amorphous shape that you could neither identify nor classify it.

“Yes,” you murmured, eyes searching his. Your lump of clay congealed on your hands, misshapen and somewhat forgotten as you mindlessly worked into its soft material.

“Was blessed by the almighty Gai’Athra Triclops at birth with it,” he offered, though that was no more answer to your question than a goose was a swan. You nodded like you knew what that meant, like the very words weren’t slipping away even as he spoke them. “My turn. Where did you learn the tongue of Avdĭn?” Honey-tongue.

[The tongue of honey: a last relic to a land forgotten and swept away by time and sand. Barely any survivors made it out of the extinction of the Sigonian wastelands, and the language remains as mere fragmented shards amongst those who crawled to safety. Though nearing total deterioration, the tongue still serves as a bastion that those of the Avgin will one day regain what they lost.]

A question for a question, though you could feel the pressing weight behind his in a way that was never present in yours. Mechanically, your fingers pressed indentations in the cylinder to make room for eyes—feeling the cheekbones slowly melt into shape, and the strong nose taper beneath your hands.

“I’m sorry,” you murmured. “I woke up two months ago with no memories of this world, and nothing but my name, occupation and New Metis remained in my head.”

“I see.”

The two syllables were embittered. He pulled away, focusing on his task once more with none of the cheer he possessed mere moments ago.

In hindsight, this brief moment could’ve been considered a turning point in your short new life. However, you didn’t and couldn’t know that; rather, your attention was honed on the face taking shape in your palms.

How strange. Furrowing your brow, you cast your gaze to your other attempts you made while growing distracted; all shared a startling similarity that could no longer be ascribed to mere coincidence. A high, arrogant brow cast a thoughtful shadow over erudite eyes, while the rough mouth shaped by the flat end of your wooden carving tool held a displeased sort of heaviness that reminded you of your peers that went into teaching. Even the wavy hair you thought you only briefly shaped held the same uniform sort of curl in the front and back, framing the sides of his face until he bore an uncanny resemblance to his predecessors. Nonetheless, they possessed a nostalgic, dreamlike quality you couldn’t bring to destroy.

Frowning, you set the new face to slumber alongside the rest.

. 　⁺ ✦

The frequency of Aventurine’s forays had begun to augment themselves. He was no less cordial and cheerful than—and no matter how hard you tried, there wasn’t any anger nor coldness that you could detect. Neither did he cease bringing you back something each time, though this time you could feel the desperation to cling to normalcy with him.

His departures felt like thought itself, wrapped neatly in a contemplative air that prompted you to press your lips together and look away.

In the end, you’d gotten used to his presence despite your reticent nature. That was your fault in the first place.

[Princo Kakavasha, of the Avgin bloodline. The only prince that survived the Katica-Avgin Extinction, the one who desperately searches for ◼◼◼◼◼.]

A prince. Charcoal stained your fingers as you absentmindedly sketched designs for new sculptures. It made sense why a prince on the run needed a place to stay, especially with someone strong enough to save his life. It made sense, but it embittered you to the same depth as he.

Staring down at the large sketchpad, you frowned once more as that familiar face took root. Though this time, the soft waves of hair were shaded a sooty black, while a finger-smudged crown of laurels sat neatly in his hair. A dull ache resonated through your mind as you tried to remember where exactly you’d seen those accusatory eyes.

Who is that?

Who are you?

. 　⁺ ✦

“Who is that?”

Another week passed. The man named Kakavasha to some, Aventurine to others, appeared to have been contemplating something very deeply—and his train of thought had noticeably approached its final destination.

He peered over your shoulder now as though there was never any distance between the two of you. In his fragrant, red-stained hands, he carried a basket of foraged fruit: something he only took the effort for when he was in a particularly good mood. The tired glare of your eyes softened at someone you’d fostered a tentative friendship with getting comfortable once more.

“I don’t actually know,” you murmured. Though you took your time sculpting birds, faceless figures and endless ceramics to both sell and use, the image inked into the sketchbook resembled none of those—but rather something your hands felt strong gravitation towards. Rich purple bled into once-ink-black locks, while sanguine lips pulled back in a sharp grimace.

Beautiful. He was beautiful, in every right, but all the media you cast him in never showed him happy.

“Maybe he’s from my past,” you lied. The hands skillfully easing the knots in your upper back paused, and when he spoke again, his cadence was significantly clipped.

“He might not even be real,” he retorted scathingly; startled, you turned to look at his face, but his expression was still pleasant despite his words. “If you want me to, I can check.”

You started at the unexpected thrum of hostility that threaded dangerously through the syllables leaving his lips. Rationally, nothing in this world was a coincidence. If you were somewhat superstitious—carefully treading around cracks in the pavement, praying for a tidbit of luck whenever sugar spilled—in your old life, the magnitude only increased now.

The pounding headache you got whenever you stared down at the man without a name only further attested his significance.

It was only logical to carefully tear the page out from the metal teeth clipping it to the rest, and hand it to someone offering to help. But just as strongly was the undercurrent that bid you to keep it safe: keep it close.

This was a mystery you had to solve yourself.

“It’s fine,” you said instead. “I have a feeling he’s not real, too.”

It was a lie, of course. The man staring up at you from the paper felt a pen-stroke away from breathing—brows carefully poised in a question.

Why did you create me?

. 　⁺ ✦

There was ozone in the air tonight. Through the open window, the draught stirring your fluttering curtains and brushing across your furrowed brow felt more sentient than not.

Tonight, your sleep didn't come easily. Hours of fitful tossing and turning had led you by the hand to a restless slumber—not the dreamless night you were used to, but something far more sinister.

Tonight, you walked past desolate fields under the pitch-tinted sky. The two suns were gone, and the moon appeared to exist only as a mirage. Just like the ever-amorphous path, it could not even keep its spherical shape.

It was the field you woke up in all those months ago, but it no longer seemed as welcoming as it had, nor did it resemble the cradle it did previously.

No end was to be found on the path you trod on. And walk you did, from one end to infinity to the other: never quite knowing why, but treading the beaten road nonetheless. The only justification you could find was the urgent beat of your heart and the taste of iron on your lips as you borderline fled this place—so filled with despair and loneliness that you needed out.

A flash of damson flickered in the edges of your vision. Wonderingly, you looked up, onto to be met by the distant view of the port of the Isle of Thassos. Except, this wasn’t Thassos, and this certainly wasn’t a very good dream either.

It was far too grey. The moon sat lonely in the sky, while you reflected the heavens and were just as lonesome.

Your feet ceased their patter, and the audible crunch of earth beneath your ragged, bare feet was the only sound you had heard so far in your solitary eternity of wandering.

Up above you, the tendrils of a small star blazed into existence; the moon was no longer by itself.

The breath in your throat lodged itself inside, while your eyes traced the path of the two heavenly bodies that ambled their way towards the horizon. When you focused on the line of precarious cliffs kissing the firmament, there was a figure amidst the bleak backdrop. Though as soon as your pupils honed in on the person in their solitude, their garb rippled and you could only watch your company slowly drift away.

“Wait,” you tried to call out, but your syllables warped and scattered in the vacuum between you two.

Nonetheless, you thought you could see a flash of damson as he turned—a pale face framed by rich locks, lips pressed together in displeasure—before he ceased to exist in the intransient space of your mind.

You knew him.

Despite the leagues separating the two of you, you knew him.

. 　⁺ ✦

On the day Aventurine’s luck went to shit, it was a brilliant July day—almost qualified to be completely perfect.

Nobody could sense the slight change in the winds: not the prince himself, nor his teacher. In fact, the lot that Fate sent him today was so similar to all the rest that no one thought to scrutinise the strand further.

Kakavasha had always been lucky. Fortunate. Clinging to life by the skin of his teeth and miraculously, miraculously surviving; even when he let go of the narrow precipice with the express wish of slipping into death.

This is perhaps why it was better to describe that particular July day as a lapse in his destiny, rather than it totally going haywire.

Of course, like all days, he naturally assumed his golden, shining thread of life would remain unbuckled by the pressures he exerted on it. Like a tightrope, he had long gotten used to uncaringly placing his weight on it—one foot after the other. After all, it had never failed him before.

But, alas, today the thread binding him to fortune loosened somewhat.

It started as all days did. He woke up bathed in the comforting scent of your home, yawning as he ambled downstairs to where you already lounged with a thick book and a cup of tea that had notes of bergamot wafting from the rim. He felt refreshed, like he always did—a lack of nightmares plagued him in the sanctuary of your home, where you reigned over it like a god would their temple.

At least, out of all the gods he prayed to, you were the only one who saved him with tangible hands. With fingers stained with mauve clay, and messy, loose clothes that were a far cry from the stiff cuts of the city, you did what a dozen spellswords couldn’t. Save someone, and stay alive yourself.

It weighed on his mind as he saw the long rib bone from the dracon carved into a curved blade that you kept by the fireplace. There was light dust on its gentle slope, yet Kakavasha had never felt more secure even if you barely held the thing. After all, you had felled its source material with nothing more than a branch and strange, brilliant magic which he could never hope to replicate with the Avgin arts.

It was something other.

Perhaps it was his pensiveness that led him deeper into the forest, past the cold thrum of the river and into the Borderlands proper. He’d ventured here enough to know where the miasma liked to frequent: shadowy monsters who still cropped up despite the tales of the glorious Hero those over the South Sea liked to spout.

If there was anyone to herald as the anointed one, it was you.

Soon, the wind turned sharper and saltier, and he could taste the chalk in the air.

The cliffs of the Borderlands.

There was something strange in the atmosphere. As though someone was watching him, but upon turning there was nobody there. Aventurine shook it off, deciding to walk further until he saw pitched tents in the distance, where he could distinctly see workers mining into the sides of the cliffs.

“Hoy,” one greeted in a thicker Southern cadence as he wiped the sweat off his brow. “Fine day we’re having, y’think?”

Aventurine studied the man’s naive, friendly expression. It was clear he was on break, chowing down on some fruit and swilling something he could identify as a sort of cloying mead, threading honey-sweet through the air.

Just to be safe, he’d employed one of the glamour arts, changing the harsh neon of his eyes to a softer brown. He’d done the same when he first stumbled in your vicinity, but he had the feeling none of his enchantments worked around you. There was a pressure greater than his whenever he began the soft weaving of prayer around you, something he didn’t think you were even aware of subconsciously. Like a coil of electrified wire, you were constantly live, overriding any magic and rationality the blond had.

“Y’mining?” His lips pulled as he slipped into the accent with ease, suddenly remembering the ease with which you spoke both common and honey tongue. There was a third language, too, one you sometimes donned when performing your strange arts—the same one that had decimated the dracon on the river that day. No matter how his ears pricked to hear it and try to understand exactly what you said, all he could comprehend was a faint, ozone-like buzz—something that warned him to not go any further.

Thus, he gave up on ever learning this strange magic to help restore the Avgin back to their former glory.

There were times when he deemed it unwise to push his luck, after all.

The worker’s expression convoluted into something sour, then finally into a sort of contemplative wince. “Err, not exactly. Our tools won’t cut the damned stone, but every year the cliff erodes through leaving blocks of itself that we then haul off and sell.”

His brows raised in a perfect picture of surprise. If there was anyone who was up for the challenge, anyone who could work their magic on the immoveable stone, it would probably be you.

“How much?”

“I’m… sorry?” His syllables stumbled over themselves, thinking he had perhaps misheard the blond’s question.

“How much for a block?” Aventurine gazed at the smooth rock cuboids that eclipsed his height, eclipsed even yours.

Dumbly, the man listed a string of numbers that would’ve made your eyes grow wide in disbelief. Don’t do it, Kakavasha, he almost heard you say. He smiled, a small one that nobody ever saw but you. Your words of financial caution were heard loud and clear, but he was already thumbing the edge of his space-sealing charm that hung off his belt.

“Who do I speak to?”

. 　⁺ ✦

How endearing. The man named Kakavasha crouched by his teacher’s slumbering body—on the flagstones by the yard, you snoozed peacefully while your tattoos flickered in and out of existence. Out like a firelamp, he thought, too used to your exhaustion after performing massive conjurings that would’ve taken at least five spellswords and five times more time to realise into the material realm to truly panic like he did the first time.

This time, it was an extension into the lush gardens; there was now an outdoor workshop that merged the clean, open air and the delicate marble architecture. It was circular in shape with a stained glass roof covering all the materials within, which drew intricate patterns on the large block of stone that stood proudly in the centre.

It will be my magnum opus, you’d mused, and he was too fascinated by the excited gleam in your eyes to truly dwell on the two strange words that had followed your winding voice.

Carefully, he brushed the small twigs and flowers off your shoulders, propping your head to rest gently on his legs. Leaning back on his palms, he closed his own eyes to the steady rhythm of your breathing, as you slept the magick off—imagining this as every day for the rest of his miserable life.

It was a pleasant dream.

There were bags under your eyes that belied the nightmares you denied: strange landscapes rolling off the disturbed cloud that seemed to follow you with each step. But in slumber, you looked utterly at peace.

With trepidation, he leaned down: ear to your face to make sure you still breathed.

Don’t leave, he commanded, though he knew if anyone could break the tenuous bonds of his enchantment, you could.

Nevertheless, it didn’t stop him from trying.

. 　⁺ ✦

“Will he succeed? That is the question,” the youthful girl murmured. HER hands fumbled somewhat on HER spindle, as if SHE hadn’t been spinning threads since the very universe woke up in his cradle.

“There is only one fate that hangs in the balance,” the matron insisted. HER face was drawn together in a scowl that marred HER elegant face: brows pinched together, mouth pressed into a thin line. “He must.”

“I bade you to consider the existence of the other fate,” the hag croaked. As always, HER wisdom was not initially clear to the other two women; Clotho’s hands ceased in winding thread onto a spool, whereas Lachesis put down HER gleaming ruler onto HER lap.

“The golden child?” the mother queried. HER voice contained a sharp shock of disbelief. “The boy whose fortune will always be solely his own?”

“I do feel quite bad for the boy. He will never keep who he truly loves.,” Atropos defended. In HER hands, the scissors continued callously severing the marked lines of fate, finally freeing a mortal from the endless suffering life brought.

“Please,” SHE scoffed. “You were the one who got us into this mess in the first place. Don’t get us into another one.”

“Hah,” the hag snapped. “As if you weren’t anxiously waiting for this to play out.”

“This was mere curiosity. Rethreading the tapestry of time is no easy feat, sister,” Lachesis seethed.

“We have never tampered with probability like this,” the youngest added; a distinct trepidation wavered HER syllables.

“We are saving someone innocent from the same limbo we are stuck in,” Atropos replied flatly. Despite HER weathered cheeks and aged voice box, HER words were steadier than they’d ever been. “Don’t forget we judge what is fair and what isn’t.”

Both the maiden and the matron went quiet, with only the sound of thread against thread and the sharp sounds of a metal ruler cutting through air seeping into the endless cosmos.

. 　⁺ ✦

The dreams didn’t cease. Nights spent tossing and turning while that pitch-tinted landscape unfolded afore you became so common that you began sleeping off the exhaustion in your studio: nestled against the cold side of the massive block in the middle, with nothing more than a tarp covering your body,

It was frigid, and uncomfortable, and left you with a profound ache in your bones—but the dreamless cleansed your mind and filled you with nothing but the insatiable urge to draw. That man who’d faced you briefly at your slumber’s conclusion only exacerbated this effect: damson, scarlet and a rich gold flowed from your paint palettes, while your tools collected dust.

Seven days after Kakavasha gifted you the stone, the first rough draft of your sculpture had materialised in your sketchpad. Countless renditions had swept over your hands: page after page was filled with the smudged body of the man in your dreams. Not once had he smiled at you, thus each face appeared troubled with the weight of the world.

The sketches began with the elegant planes of his body—a light step combined with rippled muscle supporting his bones. Then, eyes blinked up at you—irritated at his materialisation on the page, but there was something so entrancing in the cold glare he levelled you with. A strong nose gave his face some structure, extending and tapering into two brows that cast a deep shadow over his eyes. Finally, a mouth stained rich with graphite tensed at your ministrations: pressed together disapprovingly, like he was disgusted by the pixels that made up this very world.

The dreams still hadn’t ceased. You still woke with sweat dampening your face, reaching out for a man who lingered for no longer than a second in the plane of illusion.

But some things had changed. The sketches you pinned to the corkboard above your workbench had grown softer.

He still didn’t smile, but the shadows above his eyes no longer looked as deep, and his mouth was more of a tranquil line than a frown.

Fourteen days after Kakavasha gifted you the stone, the final sketch was ready: a life-size model of the man who eluded you. Just like you in your dreams, his hand reached out to an entity that did not exist in his own plane (you). His forearms gleamed with soft grey bracers, while his body was draped in delicate robes that looked like the ones you woke up in—but older. His garb was not of the glitzy New Metis, though you could see intrinsic similarities in the cut and how the garments were worn. Nestled in the gentle crests of his locks was a half-crown of laurels: something you saw him wearing night after night but couldn’t pinpoint the significance of.

It consumed you.

Every day had been spent in the warmth of the studio that you’d hastily put up just a fortnight ago. From dawn—when Aventurine left for his daily excursions—you pressed your stick of graphite into paper and drew, weaving together the image of a stranger until he meshed into something almost-tangible. Though Aventurine tended to stay out of your business, he had definitely noticed; your apprentice made sure to leave you food at the foot of the studio door, and when you stumbled into the villa at dusk, there was always a pot of food already simmering away in the kitchen.

Your dreams merged into reality; the trance only broke when your palm pressed against the cool stone of what would be your magnum opus.

Cold. It could only really be described as cold, but you swore you could feel something stir within—as though it were the faintest pulse, light as gossamer.

You shook it off, and picked up a chalk stick to mark the preliminary shapes to cut.

Drawing on the stone was easy. Like a child doodling on the sidewalk, the chalk pressed thickly into the ore. Perhaps it hummed beneath your thorough hands, but that was neither here nor there.

After all, you had gotten used to the strange nature of this world.

Tracing your fingers along the grooves, you surveyed the stone wonderingly—how the hell were you supposed to actually begin? Forget the pressure that you felt from who-knew-where; Aventurine had told you that tools couldn’t cut this stone, but the slight sparkle in his eyes indicated his faith in you.

Why?

Why, you contemplated, staring at the deep colours that tentatively traced the limits of what would be your sculpture. Absent-mindedly, you pressed your palm on the circles that marked where his hand would reach out. Like your fingers were reaching past the vacuum of reality into imagination—past the stone and into a state of spaghettification, like you were reaching deeper than his desperate hand and into the black hole of his heart. Something so heavy it couldn’t help but draw others into its reality.

It seemed to shiver slightly.

Running a blunt chisel along the plane of the stone, you weren’t surprised in the least when it neither chipped or cracked. It was not like the yielding marble you’d carved small birds into—cold, but soft when you knew how to work it right. The rock that Aventurine found was immoveable. You knew instinctively that your chisels would be about as powerful as tissue paper against how densely compact the atoms no doubt were in the rock.

Muttering a quick incantation, you could feel the latent flow from your tattoos envelop your chisel and warm your hammer; the tongue of thought strengthened the materials you would use, imbuing them with the abstract of destruction.

Equivalent exchange.

You could feel a faint wave of exhaustion ebb into your bones—not enough to knock you out, but enough to indicate the transfer was successful. Yet, still, the rock didn’t budge; a painful scraping sort of sound traced the air, but there were no other effects.

He was right, you contemplated pensively. Tools really did not work, but from what Kakavasha had relayed, there was a periodic sequence where the cliffside of the Borderlands dropped these massive chunks of stone. It was too strong to be naturally eroded, and neither could the best equipment of this time cut it.

This indicated some other force at work here.

Your chisel hadn’t worked, but there seemed to be some reaction when it was just your bare hands. With careful, trembling fingers, you reached for the stone once more. Something that couldn’t possibly be pliant like your clay, something that hadn’t been cut by the heavy duty cutters you used for your marble busts.

Nothing.

Your hands couldn’t work miracles. By themselves, your hands could not possibly do what a good old hammer and chisel couldn’t.

Nevertheless, there was a pulsing thrum in the material that only intensified the longer you pressed your palms onto it. It was as good a time as any for the system window to show you exactly what this block of stone was made of, but alas, fate wouldn’t be that generous. Disappointed, you drew back to make a note to research the Borderlands cliffs, only to pause.

There, imprinted every-so-faintly into what you thought was a stone impenetrable, were the traces of fingerprints.

. 　⁺ ✦

Deep in the heart of the Borderland colossus that guarded the straits leading to Metis, something was stirring.

Coalescing.

The cliffs had been a symbol of strength for centuries: a last bastion of defence for Metis against the hordes of shadows that still roamed the dense forests. Those interested in geology, a rather niche field for the hub of philosophy and orthodox sciences in the city, had published papers remarking on the unnatural way the monsters seemed to agree on a specific rule when venturing through the Borderlands.

The most primitive of laws, this avoidance was described as: the law of the jungle. Strength won over all—in this case, something was off about the cliffs. Those large blocks that made up the ‘off-cuts’, as geologists liked to put it, could not be analysed in any conventional methods. Smaller samples were impossible to gain, while outside observations yielded little.

Simply put, there was and had been a flow of energy that thrummed like Ourosboros’ heartbeat for the past millennium or so.

And now, that energy was gathering. Not all at once, of course—more like a very large hourglass that only now had been turned. Slowly, but surely, the thing that had laid dormant for so long was waking. It was growing aware of one of its pieces that it had discarded after so many humans had hammered futilely at its walls.

For the first time, one of those pieces had been pushed back by an energy far greater than the energy it constantly pressed outwards. Something so ancient it could not be defeated by mere human tools.

And thus, this energy was slowly being siphoned off. Granule by granule. Piece by piece. Particle by particle, the entity stuck in the Great Wall of the Borderlands was being transferred—for no energy was ever created or destroyed. And particle by particle, that block of stone was gaining more of its fragments.

Bit by bit, the workers at the cliffside witnessed the beginnings of a tidal wave in geology.

Bit by bit, their tools finally sunk into the white stone and embedded inside the giant’s slumbering body.

Bit by bit, the geologists would come and analyse their samples, only to come back with even more questions as it turned out to just be ordinary rock that made up the cliffside—that had formed one of their largest conundrums for the past centuries

The wall of the Borderlands was growing weaker—there was no doubt about this—but in turn, there was something else gathering its strength.

. 　⁺ ✦

Like most of his previous relationships with his fellow humans, Kakavasha noticed the stark difference between others’ fortune and his own. He noticed: the unlucky stumbles he never seemed to come across himself, the fatigue wearing down on someone’s bones, and how one’s actions often seemed to consume the person initiating them.

Of course, it is much easier to identify something from an outside perspective—namely, that his master’s time was so merrily occupied with sculpting that he barely had time to eat. Aventurine did what he could. He chopped onions into neat cubes, made matchsticks out of the root vegetables that you’d planted painstakingly, and carefully made sure you had at least two meals a day. Despite his efforts, however, your passion appeared to be gnawing at you from the inside.

Your misfortune was clear as day to him. The wonder he felt at your ability to indent the rock with your hands (oh-so-human they were) was overshadowed by his worry over the gauntness in your face. You were extraordinary. There was no doubt about that, and he had come to expect it. This misfortune, for it was every sense of the word, was due to him bringing that cursed stone in. As always, he was the cause of despair in others.

But just as humans judged a situation from the outside easily, it was much harder to do so from inside it. Aventurine’s fatal error was in assuming he was absolved from bad luck. After all, his very birth was a golden one; where those born under an ill-omened star languished in despair, he was positively mired in fortune. The name Kakavasha and the adjective blessed could not be easily distinguished; this was a fact he long knew.

Thus, Aventurine was dangerously reckless. As his thoughts of you began overriding the thoughts he had of an ordinary future, he, too, failed to gauge the situation from the inside.

Your passion was not the only all-consuming one.

. 　⁺ ✦

August arrived with no more than a whisper. Silently, it had crept its fingers alongside yours, and you found yourself staring at the abstract shapes that composed your preliminary statue with something akin to wonder.

He was to be your height, but the vast stone made him seem like a colossus. Something that you created, something you actively shaped to remove the damson-hued figure from your recurring dreams. He was to be your height, but already the bearing of the lines was far more regal than yours. In the night, he shone like gold—eyes and skin luminous in the lone moon, yet utterly reproachful when he stared at you. He was to be your height, but you felt cowed whenever you felt the thrum of a pulse in the stone.

You were sure you were imagining it. A side effect of the hum of your tattoos. Perhaps it was merely the reaction of a stone said to be unyielding.

The stone could not possibly be alive.

. 　⁺ ✦

August was once named Hekatombaion, back when the city of New Metis was simply called the centre in the old tongue. The month ushered in a new year: a herald of possibility, a harbinger of all omens. And like all things, it started at the very beginning.

A day to mark all days henceforth—the Day of Silence. Millennia of traditions had homogenised under cultural pressure, creating a day of festivity that absolved one of all suffering and sin from the previous year. It was a chance to cleanse the mind in an environment where thought was always encouraged. Silence. In the modern era, it no longer possessed the same ritualistic heaviness it once did, but nonetheless, it was a day for reflection in Metis.

The first of August.

The beginning.

Germinating in the very centre of the stone was a consciousness that had been sleeping for a millennium, yet one that never fully slipped into slumber. The seconds had turned into minutes as he counted them to prevent himself from losing his mind; into hours as he recounted all the knowledge he had learned from his extensive studies; into days as he slowly compartmentalised his memory into a shelf of segments. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries.

Each day was longer than the next.

He held on by mere fingertips, envisioning the evolution of science and humanity through simulation alone. On the precipice of madness, it was no surprise that his lucid being was slowly becoming binary. Zero. One. Zero.

One.

Ratio’s existence was a computation. Abstract. Immaterial. He was theoretical in all senses, and he had long lost all feeling.

Except, it was the first of August once more, and the seventh prince of Metis had just felt a brief pressure on his incorporeal body. Something so absurd, so inconceivable, that he simply brushed it aside in the endless matrice of his mind. He had lost all sense of physical touch at the very end of his physical life, therefore phantom pain was computed as an anomaly every few decades or so.

There was no other evidence to suggest otherwise, after all. He could not see, so he could not check for any disturbances. He could not hear, so he could not listen for the sounds of hammers or beasts careening into his form. He could not taste or smell, thus any chemical erosion causing the faint twinges was not based on observation.

In any case, the faint pressure that occurred on the first of August was well within his margin of error: a mere blip in the fabric of his binary. Veritas Ratio, once descended from a mad god, carefully chalked it in the vast amphitheatre of his mind as just that: a remnant of madness. A rather contained, controlled sort of insanity, for which there was no other output than input.

On the second day of what was once Hekatombaion, however, the pressure happened again—and this time the entity known as Veritas Ratio noticed. It was not the harsh clang of tools like he’d envisioned in his simulations of civilization; from the final image that replayed of Aha leaving THEIR son in the cliffs, he had documented and painstakingly predicted the wear in the environment. The climate, the evolution of species, the flora—and finally the use humans had for natural resources.

He had imagined that, should he ever regain physical feeling, he would awake to the harsh beating of hammers and chisels.

But this pressure was an anomaly within an anomaly. He wasn’t supposed to feel—and the striking of tools did not follow. Rather, the faint resultant force still held traces of firmness, but it did not have the painful impact of a hammer. This wasn’t enough to draw a conclusion—Ratio had no corporeal form, therefore his evaluation of this force needed more data to shape an analysis.

Thus, the entity Ratio brooded in his imprisonment; for he felt a nagging curiosity for the first time in a millennium at the prospect of data from outside.

On the third day a pattern was bound to emerge—and so it did, in line with the previous two forces he’d felt on his being. Something softer than metal, he noted in the vast bank of his mind. Like a hand that had simply reached past the covalent bonds and into the cliff itself, something was carefully grasping and twisting the energy that made Veritas up. He could feel the slight shifts: could imagine the pull of what he thought was a magnet.

Slowly, the mind of Veritas Ratio was regaining the human sharpness he once prided himself on. Man rather than algorithm.

The simulations became background noise; rather, the entity placed that ticking clock in the forefront of his brain once more. Each second was carefully counted down until he could predict the periods of when he’d feel that pressure. Perhaps it could be earthquakes, he mused. Seismic activity could certainly cause such shifts.

Yet, the wavelengths he registered weren’t the sinusoidal pulses of plates shifting; no, they were irregular, yet filled with a consistency that pointed him to fauna once more rather than flora and the shift of nature.

A monster? Sightings of giant beasts had been ever-so-rare when he was still the seventh prince, but Ratio had included a possible population rise—a smooth exponential if he ever saw one—in his simulations of Ouroboros. He was no fool.

But the longer the ebb and flow of force continued, the less it resembled the territorial marking of a beast.

It resembled a human.

Yes, the hands slowly pulling and pushing at the rock were utterly incomprehensible—but they were just that. Hands. They couldn’t be anything else, not when Ratio could feel each finger gently curl around his incorporeal soul. It was not the sharp strike of a mallet, nor the blunt scrape of a chisel boring into him. Hands: kneading him back into place as if he weren’t rock.

It was a lie to say he believed it, but data was all he could rely on.

. 　⁺ ✦

Metageitnion was the month of thanksgiving, and by the time autumn crept in, Ratio could hear the merest whispers of sound. The tiniest of frequencies—of which he clung to with gratitude, with such desperation it would’ve shamed any greater man.

But Ratio had not been man for a millennium. He had not heard, not seen, not felt, not tasted, nor smelled, for a thousand years.

It began with a faint frequency that droned in the very recesses of the stone. A buzz, or a low hum, resonated as though he could hear the very orbitals of electrons whirring in each atom. At this point, the background levels of his simulations had ceased—for this was far more important.

For the first time in centuries, the sluggish pulse that still beat in his undead chest had quickened, just a little.

With painstaking care, he catalogued every murmur—every brush of something against stone, for the force that periodically shaped his vessel had sound. Everything had sound: its very own natural frequency it followed. And there was sound. By the second week of Metageitnion, Ratio had begun to discern someone’s voice.

(Like all things, it had a beginning.)

Starting off with a mere brush of air, the first words he heard were nonsensical to his bleeding ears. The first sound in a thousand years was song. It was an absurd ditty—a melody of no particular rhyme nor reason. Someone sang for the sake of it while hands prodded and kneaded at him; for by now he could feel what appeared to be a body materialising into existence. A body, just for the prince who had lost his own so long ago.

What appeared to be a rough thumb pulled and pinched at his right lobe, rolling the stone between two pieces of flesh that could not possibly be human, yet were painfully so. It dug a shallow concha into the rock, creating a very preliminary vessel for sound, but a vessel nonetheless.

A human. A human, twisting stone for a whim as though it were clay.

A human, who had given his hearing back—at least, some rudimentary version that seemed to be improving by a few degrees whenever those hands sculpted the rock he resided in.

He found himself filled with anticipation.

Who are you?

. 　⁺ ✦

“Truth, certainty! That in which there is no doubt,” were the first proper words the stranger said to Veritas Ratio. Or, more accurately, those were the first words he’d overheard—slightly deeper, more mellow than the singing the voice had been cheerily repeating. To be even more precise, these weren’t exactly proper words to his half-formed ears either; the inflection of the words was far more different than the common tongue he was familiar with, while the intonation was more of an under-the-breath murmur, followed by a static buzz of something that might’ve been a word yet he could not place it.

If he had autonomy over his limbs, though, he would’ve clung to each word until his fingers bled and his nails formed crescents in each syllable.

No matter how absurd they were.

“...then I told him, are you stupid or what? Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever…”

His voice. Every word, every flux in the language Ratio once knew, every syllable—those were carefully compounded into memory. The common tongue was no longer quite what he knew, but the prince found that each small change was eagerly discovered and rectified in his own simulation of speech.

A hand cautiously worked some stone out of his outstretched arm, and it was warm.

Ratio liked warmth.

The frozen walls that kept his time stagnant and in limbo were melting due to it, after all.

Occasionally, his words made no sense to Ratio. The prince was well-versed in etymology and language, therefore the occasional sentences in what he presumed to be the language of the Avgin (and snippets of something he could barely put his finger on, but sounded familiar), weren’t all that surprising. What was surprising to him, however, were the small sentences that possessed none of the linguistic developments of any language he’d heard before.

“Shit—” followed a muted thump; “Oh, fuck—” followed a small crash, and “What the hell—” seemed to be murmured at times of lull. The sharp, irritated cadence of the syllables suggested to him that the man was using colourful expletives; but the language shared no roots with anything he knew. Though, with each gentle press of fingers across his body, he came to accept the oddities of whoever had given him back two of his senses.

Over the month of Metageitnion, Ratio learned a great many things about the person slowly casting away his prison. The thumb that gently worked his lips was accompanied by a tale of a school in a far off land (what sounded like it, anyway)—the hand that pried his fingers apart, by an anecdote of a laboratory experiment.

A scientist, he carefully noted—one who clearly just viewed the prince as a sculpture he was labouring over. Although this was the case, it was also the case that a murmured sorry graced his ears whenever the man bumped up against him: a dignity afforded to a mere piece of rock that Ratio incredulously observed.

If it were a millennium ago, Ratio would’ve been irritated by the constant, spontaneous chatter. The conversations were utterly one-sided, yet the man appeared accustomed to casually talking about this and that: his apprentice, what he ate for breakfast, the progress of his vegetable garden, the weather. Really, the only useful things he got out of the banal talks were that this was a residence he was sequestered in; far removed from the cliffs of the Borderlands, but in the area nonetheless.

Still, he found that he didn’t dislike the talking as much as he might have a thousand years ago.

. 　⁺ ✦

Boedromion ushered in his sense of smell as the sculptor began working on his face in earnest, smoothing and kneading the material like clay while his words ghosted past Ratio’s stone ears.

He first realised it when the faint scent of perfume oil—a woody scent, with sweet, rich undertones—cut through a rather chalky smell he attributed to his environment. A studio, perhaps, he’d documented; a background slowly materialised in the artist’s wake. The warm smell of sunlight. A breeze, stirring and rustling the clothes of the person before him even more. Birds, chirping and singing with such honesty that he could feel himself ache with bittersweetness, just a little. The aroma of grass and plants.

All these things were sensations he clasped eagerly, each more precious than the last.

Of course, there was the sculptor as well, who still managed to stand out against the vibrant backdrop. Decadence mingled with the powder-fresh scent of clean laundry, but one could tell a lot from the deeper undertones that lingered beneath. He could feel a sleeve flutter against his body, before the warm pulse point of a wrist allowed for a faint profile of clay to seep into the air.

At the very centre, twining with the cool breeze, was a distant ozonic scent. Lightning, he noted, half-wonderingly. It seemed to be a constant—only growing stronger when the sculptor’s hands pressed white-hot into the stone, as though the creator of the body was less human than he’d imagined.

He’s something far wilder, Ratio mused.

A deep, fluctuating energy was concealed with utterly human anecdotes: a crackling core of lightning, with laughter masking the high frequency.

. 　⁺ ✦

Naturally, the emergence of his olfactory sense occurred tangentially to hands granting him a mouth. He could not speak, he could not scream—for his lips were only stone—but he could taste the salt of regret.

Sophos Nous’ words rang in his mind once more.

For all knowledge one must pay equal price.

Alongside the bitterness of his pride was the bite of tangerines that trailed behind with each motion the sculptor made—such a deep scent that he could compartmentalise each and every aspect of its profile. It was sweet, as if it were offsetting the grief that rested heavy on his tongue.

The notes of flavour, of scent only expanded his questions: data that only complicated the picture further.

Who are you?

. 　⁺ ✦

Who are you?

He found himself focused on every single detail of his creator; Ratio’s thoughts centred on unravelling exactly why this person could do the impossible. Every passing comment—every slip in the language he began to identify as the long-lost tongue of thought—started to intricately inscribe the sculptor with various adjectives and titles. Even scholars—revered in his time—struggled with even preliminary translations, as material to access the tongue used by people millennia ago were far and few between.

There was a certain bated breath with which he listened to the man’s fluency in the language; part of the reason that leads were so hard to access came due to the language’s ties to alchemy (though he had only learned this due to his trips to the palace library all those centuries ago).

The question that shaped his thoughts for the past few months became more poignant once more.

Who are you?

Based on the cumulative senses he’d regained, he would be an imbecile to not realise that his sight would be next to return; in due time, he would finally be able to put a face to the entity before him. A method, to try to explain the madness that he had been experiencing.

His investigations on governmental corruption (and indirectly, alchemy) had doomed him to limbo; would alchemy save him, after he already spent his life in hell? Had he finally paid off the price of his knowledge?

Who are you?

Even if he was doomed to hell again, the possibility of getting an answer to his question consumed him more than anything before.

Thus, the once-seventh prince of Metis patiently waited for his creator to give him back his eyes.

He could be patient.

Hadn’t he proved that already?

. 　⁺ ✦

Ratio endured.

He had held out for the past millennium; waiting another three months was nothing in comparison. Still, he found himself itching to claw out of the confines of stone; every brush of warm skin against his, every calloused touch of his skin and tentative shaping of his body ignited in him an impatience uncharacteristic of his previous assumptions about himself.

Managing to stay sane was a miracle, and it allowed him to appreciate the fruit that the month of harvest brought.

Pynopsion had come with the telltale signs of fallen leaves crunching underfoot, with the small imprecations that left lips right before a brush began sweeping the floor, with the scent of warm honey and spices enveloped in milk. When he was a youth, he would’ve felt the warmth of the harvest fires and tasted the pynopsia stew that was traditionally offered in the temples.

But, he found that he didn’t mind the low heat of hands fleshing him out instead: feeling all the effort the sculptor put in beginning to show. Sinew, muscle, skin—all were painstakingly pressed into shape, with stone robes carefully draped on top. In fact, Ratio could feel the once familiar feeling of bracers weighing on his arms—garments he thought he’d never wear again.

The eagerness that was slowly growing into a fervent madness was abated by the continued voice, with the mundane tales of the world outside. He listened to stories of pickling exploits with fascination, of foraging with an apprentice for berries and nuts with enrapturement, and summaries of novels with considerable interest.

Yet he still didn’t know the sculptor’s name.

There were too many things he didn’t know about him, but Ratio could wait.

He could wait, especially as those warm hands had finally begun working on his eyes—smoothing and pressing and pulling eyelids into position, then gently opening them. The first rays of light were in the form of a flickering candle: bound to waver behind the thin layer of stone that made up a tentative iris.

His sight had been the very first thing to start deteriorating: blind for a millennium, with nothing to guide him.

In this sense, perhaps he should’ve been the most accustomed to the loss of his sight, but in other ways it had been the most painful to recreate in his simulations of the world. Forgetting the faces of the old woman who sold him basyniai dripping with honey, the victims of the Elation, and the Sophos had been painful enough—but in his simulations, he could no longer recreate his own face.

He had forgotten what he looked like.

In his recreated worlds, he wandered faceless; no mirrors existed in his imagination, for any reflection would be blurred from the centre, features morphing into others.

Ratio’s anticipation of his returning sight was therefore tainted with dread—mired in a fear that should he see the statue’s reflection, he wouldn’t recognise himself. Or worse, that he’d wrongly accept the image of whoever the sculptor carved him as.

Though, this was forgotten on one Pynopsion evening. The hands chipping away at the irises were particularly gentle and slow that night, and though he could not feel pain, he appreciated the thought nonetheless. There was an orange glow backlighting the shadowy figure in front of him, which only grew clearer as the suns began hiding over the horizon.

The man was silent as he worked, but Ratio didn’t mind that either. He, too, was focused entirely on making out the details registering in his optics.

Ratio’s first view of the world as it was now was of symbols inked into the sculptor’s palm. They gradually focused as his stone retinas adjusted to the world—fixed in shape and place but seeing nonetheless. Lines that ranged in colour glowed incandescent as the sculptor worked, and though Ratio impatiently waited for the hands to move away, he catalogued each symbol as they appeared nonetheless.

Some of the images—like the scales, the geometric progressions, the sequences—he recognised, though he had not seen them decorating human skin ever before. As the sculptor’s wrists moved across his vision, his gaze jumped from the shapes to long strands of formulae written in a language that he could not comprehend: twisting and moving with each movement.

He’d never seen something quite like it. Every time the palms chilled somewhat, the sculptor murmured something in the tongue of thought and the tattoos on his hands glowed white-hot. There was a faint ozonic smell that lingered in the air after every chant—and suddenly, Ratio realised the exact reason that the sculptor was able to break through Aha’s enchantments.

THEY were revered for THEIR powerful sorcery: achieved by crude extractions of alchemists’ powers in an utterly terrifying, amorphous amalgamation of strength. That had partly been why royal supremacy had been so strong; against an omnipotent lord, who could possibly question THEIR rule?

But this was something different. Ratio, in his study of ancient magic and his secret studies on alchemy, recognised these chants for what they were; verbal conversions of energy that perhaps could never have been achieved by anyone else. This was undoubtedly alchemy, though with none of the orthodox tools that alchemists would ever use.

No, his sculptor was using themselves as a medium; a thing utterly forbidden and stupidly reckless. It was a sign-off on one’s soul, effective right after the alchemist got their wish. He’d researched it, seen the effects in back-alley streets and never observed a case of success.

Except for now.

For months, he’d heard him manually transfer energy into presumably his hands—judging by the latent glow of those tattoos—yet nothing had happened. In fact, there had been many times he’d heard a specific phrase uttered in the tongue of thought, before the distinct scent of a food or beverage filled the air. Wish after wish, yet his sculptor was still alive.

This was, perhaps, the most foolish and most practical use of alchemy he’d ever seen.

But more importantly, he knew that it could not be recreated by anyone else. There was none of the malevolent energy that came with a demonic pact; rather, it was a clean sort of buzz that filled his sculptor. It was a chaotic sort of ebb and flow, but clean nonetheless.

Still, the power that had been flowing into him for the past few months had been incomprehensible and completely unique.

He digested the information with a sort of wonder he last felt a millennium ago.

It was not fate, nor him finally paying the ‘price’ for a knowledge too heavy for him to bear. Aha had simply been too powerful, yet this sculptor was breaking him free from the prison he had been sequestered in for a thousand years.

Nous was wrong.

A quiet hum cut through his aghast realisation; he had paid a price that was never fair in the first place.

Just as suddenly, his eyes opened; the hands that had covered his eyes while the sculptor worked on him were lifted, and he could finally see.

A rush of lamplight delayed his vision for a few more brief moments, and he might’ve gritted his teeth if he could move. But when the flare faded, all he could see was his sculptor’s face in front of his own, so close that he could feel his chest rise and fall, each warm beat of his heart, every breath that ghosted his lips.

Ratio stared at him, though he wasn’t quite sure if he wouldn’t have decided to do the same had he been able to look away. He was so close that the prince could count every eyelash, every small crease in the man’s lips.

Before him was a human in the flesh and blood: not some demon like he’d half expected when he hypothesised on who was behind the pressure. A human. The gods had not granted mercy to him, but one of his fellow humans had, albeit by accident.

He found it incredibly ironic: trying to save more people from the Elation and paying the bitter price for it, and being saved by another human in return. An alchemist, nonetheless.

The sculptor didn’t notice his return of vision, it seemed—choosing to work on his under-eye, appearing utterly focused on his work. Ratio took the opportunity to keep watching: though for some strange reason, he felt the faintest agitation crawling under his skin as the man continued his light ministrations, chipping away at the stone with only hands and discarding it at his feet.

How strange.

A face had finally been put to the stranger, to his creator.

He memorised the man’s gait as he swept the room, his height, the exact shade of his eyes while they bored into his own. Down to the way his brows furrowed in concentration, to the wispy strands of tangerine that clung to the ozonic scent of him, he compartmentalised it all—the profile of his sculptor was complete.

An alchemist, gaining victory over Aha.

The thought was absurd, and if he weren’t made of stone, it would’ve brought a smile to his face.

How ridiculous.

. 　⁺ ✦

Perhaps if he hadn’t been committing you to memory, he would’ve noticed the mirror propped up against the window sooner. As it were, he only noticed the shining reflection of the lonely moon in the sky when you left the studio for the night and his vision was forced to tear away from you.

Well, the first thing he noticed about the room, regardless, was the size of it. He was far from his cliff, evidently, if the views of the forest that he faintly saw from the moonlit landscape was anything to go by. A colossal window framed it, and his eyes trailed to the workbench that could potentially give him more clues about you.

What he saw would’ve made him freeze if he weren’t already stone.

Pinned to the board above the dark wooden desk, littering the surfaces of it, and even piling up beside the bench, were sketches upon sketches that made his heart skip a beat.

Every drawing, every small doodle was of the same subject: some in vibrant colour, others in graphite and charcoal. No matter the medium, they were all of the same man. Carefully, he traced the features slowly to not skip over any.

Dark hair, coloured a lustrous damson and cascading down his shoulders in waves. Gold leaves twisted up the side of his head like a crown, and Ratio felt his own head twinge with a familiar sensation. The status of a prince, he thought feverishly. A strong nose was shadowed by proud brows, though the sketches pinned had made the man look softer, ever-so-slightly lowering his eyelids in a pensive look. Those lips in some drawings were a disapproving line, but once more in the pinned drawings, there was the barest hint of a smile on them—

If he could draw breath, the rise and fall of his chest would’ve been extraordinarily shallow: rapid beyond belief.

His focus snapped onto the drawing directly in front of him; a full-body, coloured image that detailed the robes he could feel on his clothes, and the outstretched hand that mirrored his own, reaching one.

Yearning.

Instinctively, Ratio recognised the emotion that the expression portrayed. Though it was regal, there was the clear wistfulness in the slight furrowing of his brows and his stare at the vacuum his hand reached for. But there was something in the drawings that made him uneasy.

It was only when he finally caught a glimpse of the mirror slightly off to the side that he finally realised exactly what it was.

It was a full-length, sturdy mirror: evidently meant for his sculptor to check for consistency in the reflected image. Against all the sketches that drew his attention, his vessel’s own, ghostly reflection hadn’t captured his attention instantly.

There he was: a vision that matched the sketches almost exactly, albeit with a few, less-detailed accessories and robes that marked him as unfinished. He had the same locks, the same strong brow and wistful gaze, the same yearning hand—everything, down to the very lines of his muscle and sinew, were identical as in the drawing.

Unbidden, his mind raced as he compared the blurred image of his simulations to the sketches and his reflection that stared back at him with what now appeared as regret. He searched for the generated figure, yet he could no longer find it.

That was him in the sketches. It was not merely his current vessel, nor was just some vague imagining of somebody.

It was him, before he lost both his body and his mind.

It was him, back when he was still a naive prince mired with hubris.

It was him.

In the studio beneath the lonesome moon, the lonesome statue felt his pulse thrum for the first time in a thousand years.

. 　⁺ ✦

Finally. Wiping sweat from your brow (despite the December chill that had settled in the air, though you couldn’t be surprised with the heat your hands radiated when sculpting), you took a step back to survey your sculpture.

Almost done, you mused. It had been a long five months, but the stone had yielded better than you expected. Shaping the rock had been like shaping buttery clay of the highest quality, not the impure type you’d found at the river. No, this piece of cliff had practically shaped itself into what you drew—an almost exact replica of the man in your dreams, save the few small details you still needed to fix.

Carefully observing the minute folds of cloth draped upon him, the way the muscles rippled over bone and sinew, the sorrowful way his face looked, you concluded that the strange feeling you got when you gazed at him was due to how realistic he looked—down to the slight crease at the left side of his mouth.

Working on him had felt like standing over a live specimen in the lab you worked in. On some days, there had seemed to be a second heartbeat syncopating with your own pulse: one you chalked up to the buzz of energy from the continuous alchemy you’d applied in order to be able to carve that damn stone. Naturally, this was only exacerbated by the intricacy of the statue—in fact, he was so realistic that you often found yourself telling him about your day.

It had become a routine of sorts. He was a statue, thus you told him things you couldn’t tell Aventurine, and never got the chance to regale anyone with in your past life. He was a statue, therefore he couldn’t spill your secrets—though you did keep any confessions of your death to yourself. Those things would stay buried: unacknowledged by even yourself.

You had left such scars far behind.

It was comforting, in some ways, being able to let down your guard in the presence of the statue. It was hard, in front of your apprentice, to keep up the facade of someone ordinary when your house appeared filled with seemingly unlimited resources despite your infrequent trips to the city. He wasn’t stupid—he’d also seen you fell that monster and make a sword out of its ribs—but at the same time, you prayed that he’d stay oblivious to the intricacies that made up your alchemy.

With the statue, you didn’t need to worry about mental incantations, nor the panicked look in his eyes whenever you sat against the wall and closed your eyes like you did for Kakavasha. No, this sort of distance was what you had preferred back in your old life, and were still accustomed to.

You reflected on how bleak this mindset was as you busied yourself sweeping up the offcuts of the statue—half-tidying, half-watching the first snow of December fall. It was… peaceful, you mused, a peace that you’d never truly felt in either life until now. In some ways, this was the perfect paradise that made up for your life before you crossed over.

You were so lost in your thoughts, in fact, that you jolted abruptly from where you leaned on the broom handle upon the sound of Aventurine knocking on the door. Startled, you realised that he hadn’t actually seen the statue in its almost-completed state—though it wasn’t a big deal, right?

“I brought you some spiced wine.” His voice came muffled from behind the towering mahogany doors of the annex studio, as if he were wrapped tightly in a scarf to combat the frigid weather. A smile involuntarily broke out on your face at the thought, and you swore a small draught swept through the studio even before you opened the door.

Really, you could’ve conjured a warm glass of it yourself, but you appreciated the care he treated you with. He’d settled into your life with an ease you didn’t know what to make of; the faint heaviness that traced his eyes whenever the two of you conversed in honey-tongue had faded, though when you could, you bought resources to help him search for his fellow Avgin.

“Avav,” you called back. Coming. Recently, he’d taken to teaching you the finer points of his language—sitting side by side on the couch in front of the fire, his shoulder pressing into yours as he leaned over your notebook, snorting at the mess of your handwriting while you scowled with mild petulance. Though you could read the scripts fine, it was a different story altogether when writing them—that stupid system of yours could not give you better handwriting, it seemed.

It hardly was your fault, though; even in your past life you were required to write quickly and type quickly, and it seemed you’d used the latter more over the course of your career.

Shouldering the door open, you pulled him into the warmth as he stared up at you: taking in the loose work garb that you wore in the studio, the faint smile playing on your face that seemed to simply appear one day and never faded, and finally your hands still resting on his upper arms. Like you’d expected, a scarf had wrapped around his face—but you could still see the flush from the cold air nipping at his cheeks and nose. Or at least, that was what you assumed had caused it.

He was close enough to stare at the tattoos on the hollow of your throat, and he swallowed briefly before handing you the warm mug with hands that shook slightly.

“Nais tuqe,” you murmured, and he mumbled a ‘you’re welcome’ back, wide-eyed. “Come look at the statue.”

His eyes seemed to become more flinty, somewhat, upon shifting his gaze from you to the large sculpture. “It’s… nice.”

“Really?” you teased, swilling down a large mouthful of the wine. The taste of cinnamon and star anise lingered in your mouth beneath the fuller, warm drink. “Just nice, after I spent so long on it?”

“Fine,” he sighed exasperatedly, his lilting accent growing more pronounced with his seeming irritation. Gazing at the statue like it had physically hurt him, he briefly glared at its face before he stared back at you. “You’re extremely skilled, with such exquisite technique in capturing emotion that you’d become a household name even in Metis. You—”

“Stop, stop,” you hid the lower half of your face in your palm, both in the face of such an onslaught, and to hide your laughter. “Such sweet compliments, yet such a bitter voice.”

“You’re neglecting your apprentice. I can’t help but be bitter,” he grimaced, petulant. “Five months, and I see you maybe two hours a day.”

He clung to your arm, and you could only suppress your laughter some more, missing how his eyes glared daggers at the sculpture with almost murderous intent.

“I’ll be done soon,” you reassured him. “I’ll be able to teach you sculpting properly then.”

The techniques in question that you’d used to sculpt the man from your dreams, after all, weren’t possibly applicable by anyone else. Once more, you missed the glare your apprentice levelled at the statue.

“I’m holding you to that,” he smiled, sweet as the strawberry aftertaste of the wine.

You placed the glass down on the bench, ruffling his hair with your free hand affectionately. Really, these past few months had brought you out of your reclusive shell—like some bristly cat that had finally settled in at home.

“Take a break and come see the snow with me,” he insisted, hiding his face in the scarf. “You’re overworking yourself.”

Reluctantly, you looked back to the statue—alone with the snow settling behind him in the background. You’d been planning on finishing off the final details decorating his clothes, and maybe touching up the curls of hair that rippled down his shoulders, but Aventurine wrapped his long fingers around your wrist.

“You’ve been here from dawn till dusk the past few months,” he muttered, unwinding his long scarf from his neck and wrapping it around yours with his free hand. There was a faint bitterness in his voice, offset by the vague traces of pine and oud on the garment. Wordless, you let him tighten it, lingering on the knot on your chest for a few more seconds than necessary. He seemed to be staring carefully at the jade money-bead at your neck with a pensiveness he only got when he was planning on buying something again—but it passed just as quickly, and you wondered if you imagined it. “You have time later today to work on it—it’s almost done, anyway.”

Unbeknownst to you, he’d occupy your time today as he saw fit, until the suns finally entered their slumber beyond the horizon.

Swayed, you allowed the latent heat in your palms to dissipate.

“Fine,” you acceded, dusting your hands off on your working trousers. Once more, you could feel the draught chill the air behind you, but once more you ignored it. It must’ve been the windows not being closed properly.

Moving to the cupboard that functioned as an area to store spare garments, you rummaged around for a clean shirt, trousers and warm boots, as well as a surprisingly supple coat you’d got off that one snake. Casually, you pulled the dusty shirt over your head, missing the surprised cough Aventurine let out. He whirled around with such speed you might’ve been concerned if you’d seen, but you were too busy figuring out the strange fastenings that some of this world’s clothes had.

You did the same with the trousers and shoes, and though Aventurine had turned, he could distinctly hear each piece of clothing hit the floor. He swallowed.

Folding up the work clothes, you settled them on the bench as you picked up the warm mug of wine once again. “Ready.”

“Right,” Aventurine couldn’t seem to hold your gaze. As he held open the door for you, you swore you saw the stone hand that reached in your direction move, just a little.

Upon looking back, however, nothing had changed.

“What’s wrong?” Aventurine asked from your side, forcing your gaze back to his face to answer him.

“Nothing,” you shook your head. Really, maybe it was for the best that you took a short break from the endless sculpting, if you were beginning to hallucinate things.

Statues couldn’t move, right?

. 　⁺ ✦

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